this subject.  He had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness.  His thoughts were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation.  Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.

She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano.  The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she made music which Theron supposed was very good—­for her.  It pleased him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up.  Although three months had passed, Thurston’s had never asked for the first payment on the piano, or even sent in a bill.  This impressed him as being peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going near Thurston’s at all.

An hour’s sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with beech-trees.  The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of last year’s foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn.  A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.

Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland.  He had halted, and was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort.  Yes! there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow.  And now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music.  It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough.  He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution.  The sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.

He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook much of what he had come to see.

The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn.  Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds were—­one massed about an enclosure in which young men were playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at